THE NEW YORKER tion story wide open. Apparently under the impression that agents of one level of government or another, armed with subpoenas, were about to move in on the Talent Bank, the employees there -on the orders, it was testified, of Joe D.-spent a day and part of an evening behind locked doors ripping up, shredding, and then carting away all notations of political referrals that were attached to applications and de- leting such evidence from the office computer. The Talent Bank office was in a building a few hundred feet north of City Hall. Appropriately, some peo- ple thought later, the building is the old Tweed Courthouse, whose corrupt construction costs in the late eighteen- sixties brought down Boss Tweed. Ap- parently, it wasn't the only area of city government where the Manes suicide attempt set off panic. One witness testi- fied that a Talent Bank employee com- ing over from City Hall to help had said, "If you think this scene is frantic, you should see things at City Hall. It's chaos. " I t was during appearances before the F eerick Commission that DeVincenzo made the statements that led to the eleven perjury counts. The thirty- seven-page indictment charged him with having repeatedly testified falsely that he had never known that notations of political sponsorship were attached to applications or that such informa- tion was so much a part of the process that the applications were specially grouped, according to sponsorship, when they were entered into the com- puter. He also denied that he had ever given orders to have such evidence destroyed or had had any idea that this was done. Afterward, one member of the commission described his perfor- mance as "a sophisticated stonewall," and another, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, said that some of his statements had been "not credible." At a City Hall press conference about an hour after the indictment was announced, the Mayor, who had testi- fied under oath that he had had no knowledge of the Talent Bank's al- leged egregious aberrations, said that neither he nor any of his deputy mayors had been aware that Joe D. was going to lie (if that was what he had done) -any more than any of them had had the slightest inkling last winter that Joe D. was successfully maneuvering to retire with a fail-safe pension. After the arraignment, it was reported that prosecutors had thought of gIvIng DeVincenzo immunity if he would tes- tify concerning the awarding of major city contracts, about which he was believed to have considerable knowl- edge-but, of course (whether or not his employers had planned it that way), the fact that he had an un- touchable pension had reduced their leverage. At the press conference, the Mayor said that if Joe D. was con- victed he would demand, as he had in the case of Stanley Friedman, that the judge impose the maximum sentence, but he may not have real- ized that the max in this case was seven years on each of the eleven counts. Koch al- so reminded reporters that patronage is not a crime -although the Mayor has sometimes sounded as if it were, when he bragged of running a patronage-free ad- ministration and compared it with what he described as the clubhouse-infested regimes of his mayoral predecessors. In answer to a reporter's question, he said he did not know why, if patronage was perfectly legal, Joe D. had felt it necessary to lie under oath about it or why, if there had been no question of criminality at the Talent Bank, city employees had been ordered to destroy its files. In an editorial published the next morning the News suggested an explanation. The indictment of DeVincenzo, whom it described as "the $52,OOO-a-year pensioner from Mayor Koch's patronage mill," had proved that "Koch's innermost circle has been so tainted by abuse of the public trust that one of his topmost aides was driven to risk 77 years in prison to keep the abuses secret." If the truth had been told about the patronage mill working in the basement of City Hall, "literally and figuratively right un- der Koch's nose," the Mayor's "claim that patronage had no place in his ad- ministration would have been ex- posed as a sham." A T his August 4th press conference, the Mayor referred to the actions described in the Talent Bank investi- gation as "piddling," and, in a sense, they were: only a few thousand jobs were involved. His campaign manager, Paul Crotty, predicted that the revival of what he called "an old story" would rapidly fade from public attention. 81 However, the indictment of a member of Koch's administration-and one who worked right at City Hall-was a highly unwelcome development for Koch as a candidate for reëlection five and a half weeks before the September 12th Democratic primary, in which, according to polls, the Mayor was well behind Dinkins. Koch, in spite of his most vigorous efforts, has been unable to persuade many listeners of his ver- sion of the municipal-corruption story, which is that it is essentially irrelevant to his administration and that it involved only a handful of people whom he barely knew and whose despicable actions he was wholly unaware of: "How the hell could I know?" (It is a present-day phenomenon that Ameri- cans keep being led by strong men here and in Washing- ton who never saw or heard of critical events that took place in their presence or a few feet away from them.) "In all my years in office, I have never tolerated corruption of any kind," Koch said late this spring, in a fund-raising letter. When interviewers ask the Mayor about the corruption issue, he responds either with an air of utter boredom (that old story) or with explosive in- dignation. Sometimes listeners, possi- bly a bit weary of the message, get it wrong. A few weeks ago, David Let- terman mentioned the indictments of the mayor of Atlantic City and some of his associates. Pretending to be Koch at his most outraged, Letterman said, "Now those are just arrests. . . . Man for man, my administration is still the most corrupt in the United States"- not a superlative that a candidate for reëlection would choose to have spread around. When Koch's opponents men- tion the corruption story, they are happy to place it in a historical context. Dinkins has called it "the worst cor- ruption since Jimmy Walker." Goldin, who is way down in the Democratic primary, according to polls, goes fur- ther. In the first debate among the Democratic rivals, on July 26th, Gol- din intoned the names of some of the municipal-government figures who aren't around the Koch City Hall any- more. "Tur-off, Lin-den-auer, Shaf- ran, McLaughlin, Kieves, Bot-nick . . . they haul them off in manacles," he said, looking at the Mayor. "They